From Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward the Universal Digital Library. Christian Vandendorpe. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 208 pp.
Text is anything but static as the printed word threatens to flutter off the page. This particular moment in the life of the word is the focus of many a book, dissertation, article, and blog, and it gives us cause to look nostalgically and critically at where we’ve been and where we seem to be headed.
Christian Vandendorpe, a professor of lettres françaises at the University of Ottawa, takes on a very wide and deep subject: how transformations of text and our interaction with it, as the author puts it, “affect every aspect of civilization.” Combining elements of all the above-mentioned forms, he provides what is effectively a crash course in the history of reading.
Given the enormity of the subject, Vandendorpe’s book (translated from the French by Phyllis Aranoff and Howard Scott) is modest in size and made up of conspicuously short chapters. He explains both aspects in his first chapter, where he claims no aim to be encyclopedic or exhaustive, but to offer “a reflection on the cultural transformation taking place before our eyes.” He also describes his unorthodox process of creating the book; his early drafts were written using a hypertext writing tool, and only in the final versions did he transpose the text into a word processing program. The result, by his own admission, is fragmented. While the word “fragment” may carry an unfortunate conventional connotation, so often being concerned with a grammatically incorrect sentence, Vandendorpe’s chapters are, as he alludes to in the “On Fragments” chapter, more along the lines of disconnected pensées.
The author essentially describes his own book when he writes, “Hypertext encourages the use of a large number of links in order to explore associations between ideas, to ‘spread out’ rather than to ‘dig.’” Each of his forty chapters (in under 200 pages) takes on a big idea—writing and orality; the power of the written sign; meaning and effect; the rise of the visual; the decline of the novel—adroitly reducing a complex concept, for the most part, to a comprehensive, efficient digest.
Vandendorpe asks what reading is, and whether hypertext usage constitutes reading. Tabularity vs. linearity is a unifying theme, as is the evolution of hypertext from its original usage in the 1960s in relation to computer writing as well as its application in literary theory. The chapter on meaning reveals the sort of philosophical abstraction that he confronts throughout. Some chapters are more historical (we are reminded, for instance, that the “real book” conundrum has been around since papyrus v. codex), while others are more descriptive of the reading process. He describes the temporal and geographic aspects of various cultures’ reading traditions. He considers the evolution, function, and readability of images and the progression of punctuation from the third century BCE to the Middle Ages to its use in digital emoticons. He liberally and fittingly quotes orality/literacy scholar Walter Ong and the work of myriad others, such as literary critic Sven Birkerts, whose work intertwines with his own meditations.
The fact that the chapters are discrete and moveable is part of the point. Most of his chapters relate to one another and may include overlapping concepts, but they can be read in any order, a feature that Vandendorpe might classify as “hypertextualized.” While there is some narrative order to this book (e.g., starts with, “In the Beginning was the Ear,” and moves to “The Rise of the Blog”), each chapter is self-contained.
From Papyrus brings to mind a more extreme example of monographical collection of fragments—David Shields’ Reality Hunger (Knopf, 2010), for example. Though Shields’ form is intentionally provocative and covers a more wide-ranging content, what the two works have in common is a literary, historical thread and, for the reader, a meta-awareness of his current activity. In From Papyrus, the reader is compelled to pay attention to the form and his own behavior—factors that might have been taken for granted.
Vandendorpe provides a clinical de-construction of constructs we are so accustomed to that we do not even notice them. In addition to reading words on paper—which most of us have done for multiple decades—we can see how seamlessly we adapt to new technologies. If we tried to explain hypertext to a space alien, we’d be flummoxed. We know it when we see/use it, but when we read a description of it, possibly for the first time, it becomes something altogether new, or at least our understanding of and relationship to it is illuminated. In reading this book, we can begin to viscerally understand what all the news stories, digital communications scholars, and neuroscientists are telling us: digital text can change the way we think.
Other than warnings about the dangers or limitations of certain forms of reading, Vandendorpe’s musings are free of vituperation. Even in some of the context-free, rootless, meandering forms of reading that exist today, the author sees merit. He approves, rather poetically, for example, of Wikipedia’s ability to nurture our “lifelong curiosity.” Even in his warnings or gentle admonishments, he can be lyrical. For instance, in describing the pitfalls of hypertext fragments, he writes, “[Readers] have to rediscover the flower in the petal, and the garden behind the flower.” Conversely, he is not immune to bold pronouncements such as, “By reinforcing the sense of belonging to a subculture, blogs may be partly responsible for the increasing polarization of attitudes that we are seeing almost everywhere and that could have devastating effects on the fabric of modern societies.”
The choice of the book’s subtitle (also the title of the last chapter) is somewhat puzzling. These days, when we see the words “universal,” “digital,” and “library” together in a sentence, we are usually reading about the logistics, economics, and ethics of digitizing all the world’s books (“Google” is often somewhere in the same paragraph). Vandendorpe addresses search engines in his final chapter, but not libraries. In fact, the word “libraries” does not even appear in the index at all. Nevertheless, this is a distinctive and user-friendly addition to the growing category of treatises on the hot topic of the reading. While the prose alternates between uncomplicated and dense, it is generally a pleasant and thought-provoking read, aided by its short-byte format.
KATHLEEN COLLINS
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
The City University of New York