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13. The Tectonics of Western Expression
The fault line between orality and literacy constitutes the fundamental plate tectonic in Western expression. On the literate side, the neutral theory of communication in which “noiseless concepts or ‘ideas’” are exchanged in a “silent field of mental space.” On the oral side, ideas exchanged in the emotionally charged field of attitude and design, of voice and gesture. From classical Greece onward, these two ways of communicating have existed in perpetually shifting combinations. From the collision of these two tectonic plates—orality and literacy—the great earthquakes of Western creativity have erupted. The written versions of Homer’s epics and Plato’s oral Dialogues, Chaucer’s juxtaposition of the two states of mind in his great love epic Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s double plots, all testify to this expressive geology.
From the contrast, the oscillation, between the two kinds of culture, flows the power that has dynamized Western expression. It does so because all of us continue to dwell in both oral and literate universes. We all possess both the central self generated by literate expression and the social self that exists only in company. We need company in order to feel real, yet we feel equally strongly that the most real part of us is the “sincere self” created in our private reading space. We want to hold together these two dichotomous ways of being in the world because that uneasy combination makes for the deepest humanity. When print triumphs, becomes wholly “literate,” when it manages to become truly voiceless and without gestural animation, when human utterance ceases to try, in its infinitely various ways, to hold together both kinds of self and both kinds of society, the life goes out of expression. Read a paragraph in the bureaucratic official style and you’ll see what I mean.
It is along this fault line of expression where oral and literate casts of mind and habits of expression continually rub up against one another, that digital expression is now working. Print no longer enjoys a monopoly of serious expression. The economy of digital expression is a truly mixed oral/literate one, with new mixtures emerging every day. It seeks at its best (and like all human expression it is not always at its best) to heal the separation of powers between oral and literature cultures and put them into dynamic interchange.
The history of Western expression is full of these dynamic interchanges. The filtered and stabilized text, though present from the Greek beginnings, has not always had its own way. Medieval illuminated manuscripts provide a salutary instance of this continual counterstatement, and an interesting comment on the Minsky electronic book. Again and again, medieval manuscript illuminations look like stills from an animation in progress. Consider a historiated initial in a thirteenth-century Evangeliary from the Sainte Chapelle in Paris.
The panel of four scenes on the left depict Christ calling on the tax collector Levi and at supper in his house (Luke 5:27). On the right, Christ and Saint John the Baptist preach (Luke 7: 28). The left hand cartoon strip forms at the same time the letter “I” in the opening phrase “In illo tempore.” (In illo tempore vidit Jesus publicanum nomine Levi…“At that time, he went forth and saw a publican named Levi, sitting at the receipt of custom, and said unto him: follow me.”)
I have no doubt that the illuminator would have had Christ walking around in the margin arguing with Levi the tax collector (as he does in Luke, 5) if he could have contrived it. The expanded palette of textual display offered by digital expression pulls us back into the history of Western notation, instead of repudiating it. We have always craved rich, mixed, competitive, antiphonal signals. Now, we can express them more adroitly.
Here’s one example of how it can be done, a riff on an illuminated medieval manuscript from the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
Imagine what generations of marginal illustrators might have done had their animations been able to take flight like this.
Discussions of digital expression usually take the invention of printing as their starting point. The current digital revolution is the new “Gutenberg revolution.” We might enrich the discussion, though, if we looked back further than Gutenberg, to a notational revolution in some ways more analogous to our present one, the development of space between words. From the first extant Greek texts until somewhere around the year 1000 AD, plus or minus a couple of hundred years, alphabetic texts were written without space between words, and mostly without punctuation either. At the beginning, too, all in capital letters. Here’s a striking example of a Latin text of this sort, a passage from Virgil’s Georgics, preserved in the Codex Augusteus. It is written in square capitals without punctuation.
This text is inscribed on parchment. Text, in classical Greek and Latin times, more usually came in rolls, not the codex “book” we are familiar with. The text itself came in narrow columns of uninterrupted letters. Such texts were hard to read. Look at a familiar poem written out in this way and you’ll see what I mean.
Yes, sure, you can finally make it out but look how much easier Gerard Manley Hopkins’s wonderful sonnet is to read when space is left between words and punctuation lends a hand:
Space between words, with capital letters and punctuation to signal its component parts, does not seem so far-fetched a scheme that it would take the best part of two millennia to invent. The increase in reading efficiency seems so plain that we wonder why it wasn’t adopted earlier.
For an answer, we must look to the reading and writing practices represented by scriptio continua, as such continuous alphabetic notation is called. Reading continuous script in Greek and Latin was much more like reading a musical score today than reading a text. The reader was familiar with the text. He (they were usually men) had prepared it as a conductor prepares a performance. He separated its parts in advance, and memorized the separations. He read it aloud. It was a dramatic performance and considered as such. It took time and the reader had plenty of time to take. Rapid ingestion of information was not possible in such a method, neither was it required.
Gradually, however, it became required. There was more to know and less time to learn it in. Our present system of silent rapid reading for information replaced the older slow performance declaimed aloud for dramatic effect. The propulsive force was reading efficiency, and the technique was increased speed. Moreover, readers came from more diverse backgrounds and needed more performance clues. A different “literacy” emerged from these changes.
Surely a similar process is occurring in our time. We are all piloting that informational fighter plane as it flies low over an ever-changing informational landscape. Long on information and short on time to absorb it, we need, and have created, a new way to economize our attention, another revolution like the earlier one of leaving space between words. Global trade, mass migrations of one linguistic community into another, the geometric growth of knowledge, all have generated a need to depict, in order to imagine, how information flows. We need as never before to bring abstract reasoning down to earth, because more people than ever before need to learn how to reason abstractly. We need new spaces between words, and spaces for words, in order to depict this new and more complex information flow. We’ve reviewed what some of those spaces look like. They are as yet mostly terra incognita, but as we continue to explore them, their stylistic repertoire will become clearer. If we don’t develop these new spaces for words, we will have thrown away an immense opportunity.