The History of the Book and/as Discontinuous Reading

Peter Stallybrass

I want to propose two bald and overstated hypotheses about the materiality of reading:

To take the first point, what does it mean to say that the history of the codex is the history of the index? The term "index" itself is both related to the hand and to specific functions that the hand can be made to do. In relation to the codex, the index means: the forefinger, so called because it is used in pointing; a piece of wood or metal, used as a pointer for reading; a table of contents originally prefixed to a book but later moved to the end of the books as an alphabetical index, materializing in the book itself the imagined future movements of readers’ fingers; the list of passages in books or whole books that Roman Catholics were forbidden to read from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards [censors repeatedly used the indexes at the back of books to find the passages that were to be censored]; a conventional figure of a hand with the forefinger extended, used first in writing and later in printing to draw attention to a specific passage.

As Matt Kirschenbaum has recently argued, much of the recent debate on the “demise of reading” rests on a profound historical misconception. Perhaps the most persistent myth about reading today is that “the book,” as a technological form, is organized so that we can read from page 1 to page 2, from page 2 to page 3, and so on, from the beginning to the end. This is of course a possible way of reading a book, and one that was encouraged by the development of narrative fiction in the eighteenth century. The highest compliment to be paid to a story within this paradigm is that it is a “page-turner”: a language machine in which the text itself seems to perform as a perpetual motion device, turning its own successive pages. In a “page-turner,” the teleological drive from page to page mitigates against dipping about or turning back. When cultural critics nostalgically recall an imagined past in which readers unscrolled their books continuously from beginning to end, they are reversing the long history of the codex and the printed book as indexical forms. The novel has only been a brilliantly perverse interlude in the long history of discontinuous reading. For the codex developed as a radical subversion of the technology of the scroll. One might, indeed, consider the codex as the technology through which Christianity came to define its relation to Judaism. Christianity cut up the Judaic scroll by means of the book.

The question of future forms of reading, then, is not whether people will “read” any more, but rather through what technologies and practices we will make ourselves and be remade as subjects of the text and subjects to the text.