The yestermorrow of the book - future of the book

The yestermorrow of the book

WHEN Gutenberg transformed the European manuscript into a new uniform and repeatable package, he ended the regime of oral scholastic philosophy and provided the means of retrieving the world of pagan authors.

At the same time that the new intensity of words as visual objects came into play against the old oral ground, words became visual counters in a new "objective' sense. The world of resonance and multi-levelled depth of verbal structures which had been the basis of the exegesis both of the sacred page and the Book of Nature, was suddenly muted by high visual stress.

New kinds of rational authority were substituted for the old resonance with its affinity for magic and metamorphosis.

Clearly, scholastic philosophy was a form of discourse that would not do in the new era. It was doomed, not because of its content or meaning, but because it was chatty, conversational discussion that took all manner of things into account at any given moment.

With the coming of print, specialism developed because the individual reader, by solitary effort, could speed over the superhighways of assembly-line printing without the company or comment of a group of fellow learners and disputants.

With the advent of telegraph and telephone and radio and TV as service environments, totally new figure-ground relationships have come into play. In science and in fiction, in art and in politics, the fact of audience involvement in all aspects of the social process has become an irresistible datum.

So far as the book is concerned, the mode and means of involvement of reader as co-author and of audiences as actors has been the symbolic or discontinuous form in poetry and painting, and music, in press and novel, and in drama.

Print made handwriting "obsolete', but there is more handwriting in the present day than there ever was before printing.

Obsolescence is not extinction but the necessary matrix of innovation. Therefore handwriting has blossomed out in many new forms, including that of the typescript.

In the same way as the information offered by the printed book is outstripped by photo and film and TV, the book has steadily hybridized with other forms of visual image giving us many new art forms.

There is a sense in which it is possible to speak of the book as "hardware' technology.

The paradox is, oral culture is stable and conservative, whereas the writing word is fashionable and fluctuating. There is a good deal on this subject in The Gutenberg Galaxy. For example, "correct' grammar begins with the written word. Nobody ever committed a grammatical error in an oral culture.

Alexander Pope felt that an inky smog had settled over all human consciousness in the age of Newton. What lay ahead now seems, in retrospect, to have been a considerable advance over the world that Pope saw in dissolution. In the age of video cassettes, when it will be possible to dial a book as easily as an acquaintance, totally new forms of literary experience are at hand. It is our literate job to be ready to cope with these innovations.

Photo: "The new electronic interdependence,' wrote Marshall McLuhan, "recreates the world in the image of a global village,' an aphorism aptly portrayed by the optical trickery of this Salvador Dali painting, Visage paranoiaque (vertically a face, horizontally a group of villagers).

COPYRIGHT 1986 UNESCO
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group