WHAT IS A BOOK

WHAT IS A BOOK?

By Roger Chartier

cole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and University of Pennsylvania.

Kant raised the question in 1797 in his Science of Right. His answer distinguished between two natures of any book. On the one hand, a book is an opus mechanicum, an product of mechanical art and a material (krperlich) object which can be reproduced by anyone who is in the rightful possession of a copy. On the other hand, a book is a discourse addressed to the public by its author or by the publisher who has received a mandate given by the author and who is authorized for speaking in the authors name. It is the absence of such a mandatum who made illegal the unauthorized (i.e. pirated) editions of books printed by publishers who were not entitled by the author to address their writing to the public.

At the end of the eighteenth-century, in the context of the debate over the property rights of writers and publishers, Kant framed in a legal and juridical language the ambivalence of the book which was expressed metaphorically one hundred years earlier. Around 1680, Alonso Vctor de Paredes, who was compositor and then printer in Sevilla and Madrid, expressed the double nature of the book - as material object and as discourse - thanks to an original image. He turned upside down the classical metaphor which described the human body or face as a book, as, for example, in Romeo and Juliet or Richard the Second, and he considered, not the human being as a book, but the book as a human creature : Asimilo yo un libro a la fbrica de un hombre, I compare a book to the making of a man. Both, the book and the man, have a rational soul (anima racional) and a body which must be elegant, handsome and harmonious (un cuerpo galan, hermoso, y apacible). The soul of the book is not only the text as it was imagined, written or dictated by his author, the buena doctrina; it is this text given in a acertada disposicin, an adequate presentation. If the physical body of the book is the product of the work done by the pressmen or the bookbinders, its soul is not molded only by the authors invention, but also by the decisions made by the printers, compositors, or proof-readers who take care of the punctuation, spelling, or lay-out of the text. For Paredes, as later for Don McKenzie, foms affect meaning and the substantive essence of a work cannot be separated from the accidentals of its printed texts.

If the book can be compared to a man, it is because God created human nature in the same manner than a printer prints a book. In 1675, Melchor de Cabrera Nuez de Guzman, who was lawyer in the Royal Council of the King of Spain, published a pamphlet which aimed at proving that printing was not a mechanical trade but a liberal art which deserved the renewal of the fiscal privileges and exemptions granted to the master printers, the correctors, the compositors or the pressmen. For Cabrera, mankind is one of the six books written by God. The other ones are the Heaven, compared to an immense chart of which the stars are the alphabet; the World itself which is a universal library or compendium encompassing the entire Creation; the Book of Life which has the format of a register containing all the names of the disciples of Christ, Christ himself who is both an exemplar to be copied and exemplum to be followed, and the first of all the books, the Virgin, whose creation was decided even before the creation of the World, in the Mente Divina, in the Divine Mind. Man is the only book printed by God: God put his image and seal on the press in order that the copy would be true to what it had to be and he desired to rejoice himself with a great number and a great variety of copies of his mysterious Original.

For Paredes when he describes his art, for Cabrera when he justifies the privileges of the printers, or for don Quixote when he visits a printing-shop in Barcelona, textual production is a material process which involves places, machines, and workers. Between the author's genius and the capacity of the reader, as wrote Moxon, a multiplicity of technical operations defines the process of publication as a process in which the textuality of the object and the materiality of the text cannot be separated.

For a long time, however, in the Western tradition, the interpretation of texts, whether they were canonical or not, was separated from the analysis of the technical and social conditions of their publication and circulation. There are many reasons for this dissociation : the permanence of the opposition between the purity of the idea and its corruption by the matter, the invention of copyright that established the authors property on a text considered as always identical to him, whatever the form of its publication, or the triumph of an aesthetics that judged works independently of their different and successive materialities.

Paradoxically, the two critical approaches that have brought to bear the most sustained attention to the material modalities of the inscription of the written word have reinforced rather than combatted this process of textual abstraction. Bibliography has mobilized the rigorous study of the various states of the same work (editions, issues, copies) in order to find an ideal text, purified of alterations inflicted through the process of publication and supposedly in conformity with the text written, dictated, or dreamed of by the author. Hence, within a discipline dedicated almost exclusively to the comparison of printed objects, the obsession for lost manuscripts and the radical distinction between the essence of the work and the accidents that have deformed or altered it.

The deconstructionist approach, for its part, has forcefully insisted on the materiality of writing and the different forms of the inscription of the language. But in its efforts to abolish or to shift the most immediate oppositions (between orality and writing, between the speech acts and the reproducibility of writing), such an approach has proposed encompassing conceptual categories (archi-writing, iterability) that divert from the possible perception of the effects produced by the empirical differences that they are effacing.

Against such an abstraction of discourse, it is necessary to recall that the production, not only of books but, fundamentally, of texts themselves is a collective process that implies different moments, different techniques, and different interventions : that of the book publisher, the master printer, the copy editors, the compositors, the proofreaders. The transactions between the works and the social world do not consist then only in the aesthetic and symbolic appropriation of objects, of languages and of rituals or daily practices as the New Historicism might wish. They concern more fundamentally the multiple, mobile, unstable relations between the text and its physical embodiment, the work and its material inscription.

The tension between the two ways of considering the book, as discourse and as object, does not allow for easy resolution. David Kastan has recently characterized as Platonist that which considers that a work transcends all its possible material incarnations, and as pragmatic that which affirms that no text exists outside of the materialities that propose it to its readers or listeners. This double and often contradictory perception of texts divides both literary criticism philological critique and editorial practices, opposing two positions.

For some philologists, for example Jean Bollack or Francisco Rico, it is necessary to recover the text as its author composed it, imagined it, desired it, mending the wounds inflicted upon it as much by manuscript transmission as by the composition and printing in the printing shop. It is a question, then, of confronting the various states of the text in order to recuperate the work that the author has written, or wished to write, and that the printed book has deformed or betrayed.

For others, for example the most recent Shakespearean critiques, the forms in which a work has been published constitute its different historical incarnations. All the states of a text, even the most inconsistent and the most bizarre, should be understood and eventually published, since they are the work as it has been transmitted to its readers or spectators. The quest for a text that existed outside of its materialities is therefore futile. Editing a work is not an attempt to find an impossible ideal copy text, but to explain the preference given to one or another of its versions, as well as the choices made by tradition or the contemporary editor as to the lay-out, the divisions of the text, its punctuation, or its typographic and orthographic forms.

A same tension between the immateriality of the work and the materiality of the text characterizes the relationship of the readers with their books even when they are neither critics nor editors. In a lecture delivered in 1978 titled El libro, Jorge Luis Borges states: I have thought about writing a history about books. But immediately he separates radically this history of books from all consideration of the material forms of the written word: I am not interested in the physical aspect of books (especially not the books of bibliophiles, that are habitually without any measure) but rather in the various ways acording to which the book was considered. For him, works that form the heritage of humanity are irreducible to the series of objects that have transmitted them to readers or listeners. Then, a Platonist Borges.

And yet. When, in the fragment of autobiography he dictated to Norman Thomas di Giovani, the same Borges recalls his encounter with one of the books of his life, Don Quixote, it is the object itself that first comes to his mind: I still recall the red binding and the titles in gold lettering of the Garnier edition. There came a day when my fathers library was dispersed and when I read Don Quixote in another edition, I had the feeling that it was not the real Don Quixote. Later, a friend obtained for me the Garnier edition with the same illustrations, the same footnotes and the same errata. For me, all these things were part of the book; for me, it was the real Don Quixote. The story written by Cervantes will be forever for Borges this copy of one of the editions that the Garnier exported to the Spanish-speaking world and which was the reading of a reader who was still a child. The Platonist principle counts for little when confronted by the pragmatic recall of memory.

The contradiction set forth by Borges helps us think that the conflict between Platonism and pragmaticism is perhaps a false quarrel. A work is always appropriated, read or heard in one of its particular states. With regard to times and genres, their variations are more or less important and concern, separately or simultaneously, the materiality of the object, the spelling, or the literality of the text itself. But equally, always, numerous discourses (philosophical, aesthetic, judicial) try to reduce this diversity by postulating the existence of a work identical to itself independently of its form. In the West, Neo-Platonism, Kantian esthetics, and the definition of copyright were the most powerful contributions to the construction of this ideal text that readers recognize inevitably in each of its particular states.

In 1791, Fichte has given a new formulation to such tension. He framed a distinction, not only between the physical (krperlich) and ideal (geistig) aspects of a book, but also, within the text itself, between the ideas and the form given to them by the author. The ideas are the material (materiell) aspect of the work, its content. Universal by their nature, their destination and their utility, the ideas cannot be the object of any personal property. The only legitimacy for such ownership derived from the form in which the ideas, which are as a common material, are expressed: each individual has his own thought processes, his own way of forming concepts and connecting them [...] Hence, each writer must give is thoughts a certain form, and he can give them no other form than his own because he has no other. But neither can he be willing to hand over this form in making his thoughts public, for no one can appropriate his thoughts without thereby altering their form. This latter thus remains forever his exclusive property. Thus, paradoxically, it is only by separating the texts from any materiality, either the physical reality of the book as object or the materiality of the ideas as collective repertoire, that they could be considered and owned as were the real estates.

Nevertheless, literary works, philosophical discourse and juridical categories remind us of the material operations that contribute to the collective production, not only of the books, but of the texts themselves. They become commodities proposed to their readers only thanks to the permanent negotiations between the intellectual and aesthetic definitions of the work and the prosaic world of pens and presses, ink and types, copysts and compositors. In this process what is at stake is not only the circulation of social energy, but more fundamentally the modes of inscription of textual vitality, and not only the competitions characteristic of the book-trade, but also the meaning of the works.

In this sense a closer relation between history of the book and intellectual history, or literary criticism does not invert the inherited hierarchies by granting privilege to the materiality of symbolic productions at the expense of their interpretation. As Joseph Leo Koerner has observed, focussing attention on the modalities of textual inscription might be a way of saving the soul by looking at material but finding it haunted by subjectivity. This is a forceful reminder that the understanding of the meanings invested in the works by their authors, readers, listeners or spectators remains the first aim of our interpretative work. In this sense the hermeneutic perspective remains essential for all of us. But, as Don McKenzie wrote, new readers make new texts, and their new meanings are a function of their new forms. We know, then, that the recovery of such a plurality of meanings can be fully achieved only if we are able to retrieve in all their singularity and differences the conceptual categories and material forms that gave to any text, canonical or not, its successive historical identities.

Immanuel Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten, (1797), in Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, (1902), Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1968, Volume VI, pp. 203-491, en particulier pp. 289-290, English translation as The Science of Right,, 31, II. (available at HYPERLINK "http://www.kwoledgerush.com" www.kwoledgerush.com).

Alonso Vctor de Paredes, Institucin y origen del arte de la imprenta y Regla generales para los componedores, Edicin y prlogo de Jaime Moll, Madrid, El Crotaln, 1984 [reed. Madrid, Calambur, Biblioteca Litterae, 2002], pp. 44v.

D.F. McKenzie, Making Meaning. Printers of the Mind and Other Essays, Edited by Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S.J., Amhert, University of Massachusetts Press, 2002, en particulier Typography and Meaning: the Case of William Congreve, pp. 198-236.

Melchor de Cabrera Nuez de Guzman, Discurso legal, histrico y poltico en prueba del origen, progressos, utilidad, nobleza y excelencias del Arte de la Imprenta, Madrid, 1675.

Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683-4), Edited by Herbert Davis and Harry Carter, London, Oxford University Press, 1958, pp. 311-212.

For the definition of the category of materiality of the text, cf. the seminal article by Margreta de Grazia et Peter Stallybrass, The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text, Shakespeare Quartely, Volume 44, Number 3, 1993, pp. 255-283.

B. W. Ife, Reading and Fiction in Golden-Age Spain: A Platonist Critique and Some Picaresque Replies , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, Cambridge, Mass. and London, Harvard Univerity Press, 1993; and Joseph Loewenstein, The Authors Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2002.

Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics, New York, Columbia University Press, 1994.

Walter Greg, Collected Papers, Edited by J. C. Maxwell, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966; R. B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1927; Fredson Bowers, Principles of Bibliographical Description, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1949, Bibliography and Textual Criticism, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964, et Essays in Bibliography, Text, and Editing, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1975. See also Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, Oxford, At the Clarendon Press, 1972.

Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: ditions de Minuit), 1967, and Limited Inc (Paris: Galile, 1990).

Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations. The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley et Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1988, pp. 1-20.

David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, 117-18.

Jean Bollack, LOedipe roi de Sophocle. Le texte et ses interpretations , Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1990, tome I, Introduction. Texte. Traduction, pp. xi-xxi and 1-178.

Francisco Rico, Historia de texto and La presente edicin, in Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Edicin del Instituto Cervantes, Dirigida por Francisco Rico, Barcelona, Instituto Cervantes/Crtica, 1998, , pp. CXCII-CCXLII and CCLXXIII-CCLXXXVI, and Imprenta y crtica textual en el Siglo de Oro, Estudios publicados bajo a direccin de Francisco Rico, Valladolid, Centro para la Edicin de os Clsicos Espaoles, 2000.

Stephen Orgel, What is a Text?, in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass, New York and London, Routledge, 1991, 83-87, and, as examples, for the two King Lear (1608 and 1623), cf. The Division of the Kingdoms. Shakespeares Two Versions of King Lear, Edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983, and for the three Hamlet (1603, 16904 et 1623), cf. Leah Marcus, Bad Taste and Bad Hamlet dans son livre Unediting the Renaissance. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, Londres et New York, Routledge, 1996, pp. 132-176.

Jorge Luis Borge, El libro, in Borges oral, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1998, pp. 9-23 (quotation p. 10).

Jorge Luis Borges with Norman Tomas de Giovanni, Autobiographa 1899-1970, Buenos Aires, El Ateneo, 1999, p. 26.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Beweis der Unrechtmssigkeit der Bchernadrucks. Ein Rsonnement und eine Parabel, 1791. Fragments of Fichtes essay are translated and commented by Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market. Rereading the History of Aesthetics, op. cit., pp. 51-53, and by Bernard Edelman, Le Sacre de lauteur, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 2004, pp. 324-336.

Joseph Leo Kerner, Commentary III and Postscript, Word & Image, Volume 17, Numbers 1 & 2, January-June 2001, Printing Matter, pp. 177-18O (quotation p. 180)

D.F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, The Panizzi Lectures 1985, London, The British Library, 1986p. 20

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