Source of book: I own this.
This unusual book was something I found used several years ago. I think I ran across it in one of the other books I read, but I forgot to write down the exact source of the recommendation. In any case, it has sat on my shelf, looking all too readable for a while. Twice previously I put it on my nightstand, but other books ended up taking priority, so it went back on the shelf. I decided I was going to make time for it this year.
I’m not sure how to describe Palimpsest. Nerdy sorts will recall that a palimpsest is what you get when a set of writing on a page is erased or effaced, and other writing is superimposed on the old. This was done a lot back when parchment was expensive and in limited supply. Didn’t need last year's inventory anymore? Scrape the ink off, rotate 90 degrees, and save some cash. But it wasn’t just mundane stuff. Throughout the Middle Ages, scribes often decided old works were no longer needed, and overwrote them with the new. Kind of like how libraries cull older books so they don’t have to endlessly build bigger and more complex libraries. Except, of course, some of the stuff lost turned out to have been irreplaceable, which is rarely the case in our modern world of easy printing and electronic duplication. Nobody is throwing out (or overwriting) the last copy of Aeschylus’ lost plays, for example. That said, plenty of palimpsests have been decoded, and the underwriting recovered. It’s a pretty cool story. (For a book that contains something related, check out The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt.)
So that is the story of the title of the book, but doesn’t really explain what the book is about. Well, the book is kind of about the history of writing. Don’t expect a chronological treatment, though, because this isn’t that sort of a book. It is also about what writing means. It is about the act of writing, how it related to power, the ways that mythologies treat the discovery of writing (usually not as a good thing), the relationship of writing to memory, the transformation of writing over the ages, and…well, a lot of things. This is a thoroughly poetic, contemplative, geeky, thoughtful, and just different book.
I think maybe the best advice I can give is that it is best to come to the book with no expectations of what it is, and just enjoy the stream of thoughts and ideas that Battless enables to flow across the pages. Rather than try to summarize, I will just mention some ideas and lines that stood out to me as I read it. As a human who loves to write, and writes regularly for pleasure, this book was particularly fascinating to me.
Probably the foundational idea is that humans did just fine without writing for most of our history. Relatively speaking, writing is a very new technology for us - although it has, arguably, been the foundational technology, if you consider spoken language as not so much a technology, but what separates humans from other animals.
And yet unlike with language - unlike even reading of the broad, ineluctably human kind described above - we can get by perfectly well without writing. For tens upon tens of thousands of years, we did get by without it - and millions of people do today. Writing can be absent from the brain without causing trauma in a way that cannot be said of language. And yet once rooted there, it will not be excised.
Battles also notes that writing is uniquely human in the sense of something the gods neither need nor can have.
“A letter is a joy of Earth,” Emily Dickinson writes; “It is denied the Gods” - for omniscience would make writing unnecessary, destroying its pleasure and surprise.
I hadn’t specifically thought of that before, but the gods (if omniscient) would lose entirely the pleasures of discovery and surprise. Which seems very sad indeed.
The chapter on the origin of writing is fascinating. I particularly liked his take on all the theories of how writing originated. The ideas about alphabets in particular seem very speculative.
[M]odern archeologists have associated have associated the glyphs of the proto-Canaanite alphabet, which coalesced about 1700 BCE, with a putative mnemonic tale - a story about an ox, a house, and a plow - now lost, which gave the alphabet its order. It’s a marvelous story, and - like most marvelous stories - no one knows if it’s true.
I am reminded of the definitely-not-true version of how our English alphabet came to be, as told by Rudyard Kipling in Just So Stories. I tend to think that the Kipling version (which is all about random sounds, as made by the fictional man to his daughter) is more likely to be “true” as an explanation than the more complex “story” hypothesis.
The book doesn’t just talk about our Western writing either, but spends quite a bit of time on the Eastern traditions - particularly Chinese, which is likely the first of its kind. The author also discusses the contributions of Ernest Fenollosa to the discussion. I liked one of Fenollosa’s quotes very much indeed.
We are not to court Japan for the number of her Battleships, nor China by the tonnage of her imports; rather to challenge the East soul to soul, as if in the sudden meeting of two brothers parted since childhood. It is primarily a test of ourselves, whether we are capable of expanding local Western sympathy and culture to the area of humanity.
That said, I am glad to have grown up in the West, for the simple reason that literacy is just plain easier with a simple phonetic alphabet. Battles notes that literacy became more universal sooner in the West, and that the challenges of Chinese writing led to a difficulty in social mobility that persisted even past the Communist Revolution. (The brutally difficult exams to enter clerical work are a key idea in the stories of Lu Xun, for example.) On the other hand, the Chinese way of writing has lent itself to elaborate poetic forms, one of which is described in this book.
The fact that Chinese may be read in any direction has been exploited by poets in a traditional genre called hui-wen shih or “reversible poems” - anagrams taken to a new level of multivalent complexity. The acknowledged masterwork of the genre, the fourth-century “Star Gauge” or “Armillary Sphere” by Su Hui, consists of a grid of more than eight hundred characters arrayed in regions and meridians, evoking the mechanical models of the heavens from which the poem takes its name. At its center, the character hsin for Polaris - also for words “heart” and “mind” - was left out of many editions, as the nature of the heart in Taoist cosmology is emptiness. What’s extraordinary about “Star Gauge” is the sheet combinatoric prolixity of its many readings: the characters can be read in nearly any order; as long as the generic rule of dividing it into quatrains of seven-character lines is observed, some three thousand poems are permutably possible. Some of these embedded, enjamed poems strike notes of lost love and wounded passion, while others are statements of cosmic exploration.
Oh, and Su Hui was female. The “just so story” about the poem is that she wrote the poem to win her philandering husband back. You can read a bit more about Star Guage here. Poet David Hinton wrote about it as well, and did his own translation. (Or attempt - I’m not sure one could ever translate such a work in a way that was true to the original.)
I didn’t write down any quotes for the chapter on the relationship of writing to power, but I could summarize the idea that writing seems to have originated for economic reasons - to keep inventory of goods…and slaves. But soon thereafter, writing took on its own life, and literature has tended to push back against power. Writing fighting against itself, so to speak.
Which leads into the next chapter, entitled “Holy Writ,” and, as the title suggests, is all about sacred writings, and the problems they pose over a range of metrics. For my own religious tradition, the Bible has been and continues to be both an instrument of power and violence, as well as an undermining of both ideas. I would love to quote most of this chapter, in part as an antidote to the literalist/theonomist hermeneutic tradition I was raised in, but also as a thoughtful exploration of the difficulties posed by reducing religion to writing, and thereby ossifying it.
When it comes to the Bible, authorship is a hard notion to pin down. There is the Law, which takes for its materials stone and the fiery finger of God. Traditionally, authorship of the Torah (which in one view is an attribute or dimension of the divine) is attributed to Moses. But what is this writing with which Moses is credited? Under what conditions did it take place? Can we imagine Moses stopping to write amidst the straightened circumstances of the Exodus? The Qu’ran, like the Torah, is an aspect of God. Mohammed’s encounter with writing is a vivid part of the Qu’ran itself: the Prophet’s revelations over a period of twenty-three years were recited and memorized by the sahaba, Mohammed’s acolyte army, who were ordered to learn to write in order to record them. The word “Qu’ran” itself likely derives from the Syriac and Arabic words for “recitation” (Syriac qeryana, Arabic qara’a). “Torah,” too, is a word meaning recitation or instruction.
This is just the beginning of a long discussion of the tension between a written and oral tradition. Later, Battles gets into the different sources of the Old Testament - this is an informed book, not one rooted in dogma. Here is another passage that I liked:
The Sinai covenant, God’s “treaty” with Israel, is based on precedent - specifically, those earlier, oral covenants made with Noah and Abraham, both of which take the form of ancient Near Eastern royal grants. Together, these agreements create a kind of case history of God’s relationship with his people, a record of divine utterance taking on the texture of written documents. The documents are records, but they’re also events - contracts, renewed through the unfolding narrative of the Bible, litigated by the oracles of the prophets. The magisterium of writing braids written words together with utterance, weaving itself into both daily life and the constitution of the world.
Even within the Bible, the meaning and details are renegotiated, litigated, interpreted, and transformed. It never stopped. At least until Fundies decided that their interpretation was the only possible one. Even the Middle Ages had more creative and flexible hermeneutics.
Dante describes the four dimensions of medieval polysemy: the Literal, the Allegorical (which associates one set of acts and things with another), the Moral (where acts and things represent ethical choices and sketch the limits of right and wrong), and the Analogical (in which the visible things of the phenomenal word stand like symbols - a kind of writing, in fact - for transcendent values.)
Battles notes that this, too, had its limits, but his description of the boundaries seem even more applicable to Fundy/Evangelical interpretive frameworks - that is, cages.
It’s a strict schemata, which tries to throw a cage over the Bible’s full, feral range of possibility.
At least the medieval theologians went beyond just the literal - and the narrowest version of literal too. Here is more on the subject.
It’s a bit of a simplification to say that the Christian hermeneutics that emerged in the Middle Ages was comparatively simple and methodical - the literal-allegorical-moral-anagogical model so clearly demonstrated by Dante. The procedure has proven a conveniently flexible tool for wresting meaning from biblical passages despite the twists and turns of cultural and social change - a kind of biblical-historical shock absorber. But isn’t this all about reading, not writing? No, it’s about writing too - for the ever-changing practices of the interpreters throughout the life of the Bible have been part of its writing. By testing the fitness of works for the canon, binding book to book through the connections of typology, allegory, and spiritual narrative, interpretation as much as revelation became the means of biblical authorship.
This is part of my point in a post I made that discussed why there is no such thing as The One True Interpretation™ of any text, and that what Fundies actually believe in is their interpretations. The meanings we ascribe to the text in any tradition are a kind of re-writing of the original, a finding of meaning in our own time. And thus, interpretations must be tested against reality, against new discoveries, against the way our understanding evolves over time, culture, and society. Theology is an ongoing act of creation, not a museum study of things long dead. We were not given the complete, unabridged account of truth - just a record of past wrestling and creation of meaning and truth by those who came before us. And even then, what we have is a mere tiny fraction of what was going on.
The striking thing about the Epistles is that they are radically incomplete - offering only brief glimpses of debate, oppression, fear, and evangelism comprising early Christian experience. Here and there they hint at a vital debate bodied forth in letters and utterances. But as an archive, the Epistles efface the competing views, offering only provisional traces, as any archive is apt to do. Writing, it is often said, offers complete and unbroken record keeping, the springboard of historical consciousness. But in fact it is its nature to create gaps, holes, lacunae.
This is the point I have tried to make as I have written about theology on this blog. What we have built our theological superstructure on is not even a framework - it is a handful of sources for which we lack most of the context, and all of the competing ideas, to say nothing of the practices. And as far as that goes, we lack entirely the viewpoints of women, of slaves, of the illiterate, and of minorities of all kinds. To say nothing of the views of those outside of the Roman Empire. We have balanced a house of cards upon the few surviving (and accepted in the canon) writings of an educated class of males found in a particular place and time, and then defended the house of cards against any challenge from women, from non-whites, from the impoverished or enslaved, and from LGBTQ people. No wonder my kids’ generation is leaving religion in droves.
I am tempted to wonder where religion would be in our world today if it had remained an entirely oral tradition. I suspect that it would have changed better with changing culture - and indeed the very words passed down would have changed to meet new challenges. We would have lost the original, of course, but we would have a living tradition, not a dead - or undead - one.
The last section is about technology and writing. Ever since we switched from clay tablets to papyrus, the luddites have clutched their pearls about the changes to the act of writing. Which is why this chapter looks so extensively at the changes brought about by the printing press long before we got to electronic writing. (I am typing this on my computer, as I do all of my blog posts….but I work out a lot of what I will say in my head first. But not on paper.)
Battles notes that the anxieties about change are nothing new, and many of the specific fears are also ancient, and not specific to our times. I have to remind people sometimes that fears of the corruption of youth were applied to youth learning to read - and reading books - rather than, well, all the other stuff. The technology changes, the fears do not.
Recently, our attention has focused on this very splintering of attention, and the extent to which changing habits of hand and thought make different minds, different capacities, even (and especially) different imaginations. Does the supposed demise of handwriting presage diminishing educational outcomes? Can the success of Asian students be attributed at least in part to the rigors of learning pictographic writing systems? These specific fears strike me as metonyms for larger, more amorphous anxieties - timorous responses to modernity, many of which precede the emergence of networked media and computers by a matter of centuries.
As Battles points out, much of the hand wringing over the last millennium has been possible only by ignoring the vast majority of humans and focusing only on the privileged academic elite. Crap to read has been available since books first became affordable. We remember George Eliot’s masterpieces, but forget the Penny Dreadfuls. My parents’ generation clutches their pearls about Harry Potter, while adoring Narnia - or even schlock filled with poor writing and bigoted stereotypes that they grew up on. (The Waltons and Leave it to Beaver have NOT aged very well. Or particularly Gone With The Wind, which is eye-rollingly bad. Just saying.) And we forget that pornography adorns the walls of paleolithic caves. The whole anxiety that “the world is going to hell” affects every generation, it seems, and is really just a projection of anxiety about aging and death and the fact that change is the reality of life.
Those are the highlights of the book, in my opinion. I enjoyed reading it, a bit at a time, and thinking about his points. I imagine I will be absorbing the ideas and incorporating them into my own ever-evolving view of the world. It’s not the easiest book to find in libraries, which is kind of ironic, but can be found used for not too much. Nerdy book sorts should consider seeking it out.
