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Summary
Summary
Matthew Battles explores the questions of why writing exists and what it means to those who write. Born from the interplay of natural and cultural history, the seemingly magical act of writing has continually expanded our consciousness. It has been used as both an instrument of power and a channel of the divine; a means of social bonding and of individual self-definition. Now, as the revolution once wrought by the printed word gives way to the digital age, many fear that the art of writing--and the nuanced thinking nurtured by writing--are under threat. But writing itself, despite striving for permanence, is always in the midst of growth and transfiguration.
Celebrating the impulse to record, to invent, to make one's mark, Battles re-enchants the written word for all those susceptible to the power and beauty of writing in all its forms.
Author Notes
Matthew Battles is the author of Palimpsest and Library: An Unquiet History and a program fellow at the Berkman Center of Harvard University, where he is associate director of metaLAB, a research group exploring the bounds of networked culture.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Battles (The Sovereignties of Invention) makes a dazzling foray into the history of text, from cuneiform to computer screens, narrating the evolution of the written word in captivating detail. The book begins with the appearance of writing in fourth-century B.C.E. Mesopotamia and proceeds through the invention of the codex by early Christians, the dissemination of manuscripts, and the history of printing. Drawing on accounts from varied cultures and eras, Battles finds that Socrates compared rhetoric to the planting and sowing of seeds, and that the fourth-century C.E. Chinese poet Su Hui conceived of writing as a "perceiving-through: a look through a window or a lens." Battles also explores the insidious link between writing and power, using Great Expectations to illustrate writing's liberating effects. Elsewhere, he quotes A Room of One's Own on writing as a system that can "absorb the new into the old" without tearing the fabric of the whole. In the digital age, computer code represents a new kind of writing, though one not visible to most readers. In the end, Battles powerfully demonstrates that, though all forms of writing are imperfect, they have played a vital role in the cultures which have developed them. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN AN AUTHOR assigns himself the task of compiling "a history of the written word," a reader is likely to wonder: How well written is it? "Palimpsest" is a serious, well-researched book. Matthew Battles evokes the flexibility of human consciousness and the ability of the written word to absorb and deploy new technologies even though, as he explains, writing has always had its supposed shallows, from "penny dreadfuls" to propaganda and pornography. However, "Palimpsest" puts up a dull defense of its subject. It's elliptically organized and full of workmanlike, hackneyed prose. It's a history of the written word, but it's also a repository of literary missteps. It isn't clear just who Battles (the associate director of the Harvard-based research group metaLAB) intends as his audience. The book's jargon suggests that "Palimpsest" is directed at scholars, but its ideas are an exercise in the self-evident. "There is a favored metaphor for writing's tangled skein of overlapping figurations," Battles declares, alluding to the book's title. "The ink and faint imprint of the prior text underlies the new work, preserving a trace of something that had been rubbed out." But writing as palimpsest is a familiar notion. Although the reader keeps hoping Battles is up to more than playing out this image, that's pretty much all he does. Battles is so fond of Thomas De Quincey's definition that he quotes it at the very beginning and again at the very end: "What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain?" In between, he gives us an anodyne history of the written word: its origins in the cuneiform of Mesopotamia and the pictographs of China, the symbolic mechanics of writing, the codex and the printing press, writing as a tool of political and religious institutions, copyright, the telegraph, computer code. Which is fine as far as it goes, if unrevelatory. But Battles doesn't have any particular angle on his material other than an "ain't writing grand" affirmation: "This remarkable - and remarkably simple - capacity for writing to become a symbiont of the consciousness, for a craft so sophisticated and cognitively demanding to knit itself securely into our quotidian ways - is as responsible as its great utility for the ineluctable role it plays in modern life." "It's through our relationships that we make minds of people and pages, all of us together in the written word." This is writing as cheerleading. "Palimpsest" might have been effective as a long, rapturous essay, but it doesn't contain enough material to sustain a book, and perforce becomes a dumping ground, with long, potted exegeses of works by Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and Ha Jin, not to mention an excruciating parable by Battles himself. Trend words like "originary" and "ineluctably" return, over and over, as do pet notions: "Yet as we've seen, the craft and technology of the press didn't so much erase the scribal arts as incorporate them." Line by line, Battles's writing is awash in bromide and cliché: "Writing is hard"; "Writing, in addition to being a means of recording and expressing, is also a medium of play"; "Words are the stuff we humans conjure with"; "Our world is woven from the weft our fibers weave"; "For all its topological salience and complexity, writing is linked to language." Battles praises the story of Gilgamesh for "speaking truth to power" and describes Virginia Woolf as "sallying forth" into intimate realms of consciousness. In Ishmael Reed's words, "Writin' is fightin'." Writing becomes galvanized when it's pushing against something, but Battles is never pushing against anything except himself, via dubious rhetorical questions ("It's fair to ask: What does writing want?"), false dichotomies ("Writing doesn't force or command; it teaches") and paper tigers ("We must first let go of the notion that human life before writing was either a static Eden or an endless war of all against all"). I wanted to like this book, since I care about writing not just as an activity but as a metaphor for human existence. Yet what I care most about is writing as writing. Although well intentioned, "Palimpsest" founders on its own writerly ineptitude. DAVID SHIELDS'S most recent book, written with Samantha Matthews, is "That Thing You Do With Your Mouth."
Choice Review
Joining Battles's Library: An Unquiet History (2003) and his The Library beyond the Book, cowritten with Jeffrey Schnapp (2014), this volume reflects the author's earlier experience as a librarian working at Harvard's Houghton Library. The word palimpsest strictly refers to the reuse of parchment by superimposing a new text on one that has been erased. Battles (fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard) broadens that meaning to reflect how each form of writing stands on earlier inventions, just as the typewriter does. The author focuses on the act of writing, first developed in ancient times to record the spoils of war and laws. On the way to his discussion of today's computer technology, he explores cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese characters, medieval scriptoria, and the development of movable type and how that invention interacted with manuscript production in Europe. Of particular interest are discussions of the uses of writing in the realms of law and power, religion, and literature. The audience for this study will be specialists in the history of the book. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers/faculty, professionals. --Georgia Brady Barnhill, American Antiquarian Society
Kirkus Review
An illuminating look at the origins and impact of writing. In this richly detailed cultural history, Battles (The Sovereignties of Invention, 2012, etc.), associate director of the research group metaLAB at Harvard, traces the evolution of writing from cuneiform in the fourth millennium B.C. to digital communications. Emerging as an accounting system in Mesopotamia, writing became evidence of power as well as a means of personal expression. It also changed the human mind; writing "exploits (and transforms) circuits in our brains.Writing teaches our brains to do all kinds of somersaults and tricks." Besides communicating immediate needs, writing allows for the transmission of cultural knowledge, bears witness to the past, and influences the future. All writing, Battles has discovered, is composed of "lines that cross, connect, and loop, and they arrange themselves into linear sets," whether it takes the form of Chinese characters, Egyptian hieroglyphics, or Greek, Sanskrit, or Cyrillic alphabets. Battles underscores the way writing shapes reading and thinking: "in the form of word and sentence, chapter and verse," he asserts, "writing teaches." The author highlights several texts as especially significant, including the saga Gilgamesh, unearthed from clay tablets, which imparted lessons about kingship and heroism that influenced later literature; and the Bible, which "hides its own writing from us in a haze of myths and mystical formulae." Before the printing press, hand copying made all booksincluding the Biblevulnerable to changes: "Each instance of book production was a reading, and an editing." Movable type changed the production and availability of books, but early printed volumes allowed for ample margins so that illuminators could ply their craft. Battles deftly excavates layers of human history from a wide range of sources to reveal that writing "is always palimpsestic; there is no setting-down that is not a setting-among, a setting-upon." A fascinating exploration stylishly and gracefully told. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Taking on the incredibly ambitious task of analyzing the history of the written word, Battles (Library: An Unquiet History) explores the origin of writing, as well as its evolution across mediums, forms, and cultures. The author presents an intriguing look at the early rise of writing as a method for communication and record keeping, particularly the use of signs and symbols in meaning making. Factoids on word usage are spread throughout, while references to Roman philosopher Cicero, author Charles Dickens, and others provide a thorough examination of writers' views on writing as a tool for effecting power, change, and meaning. Given the scope of Battles's project, the result is highly detailed and dense. VERDICT Thoroughly researched and thought provoking, this is a great selection for anyone with a vested interest in the anthropology and history of writing. This isn't an introductory work or a book for the casual reader; it's most suitable for academics and advanced scholars who possess some knowledge on the subject matter. [See Prepub Alert, 2/2/15.]-Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Foreword: Mind as Page | p. 1 |
| Books in Running Brooks | p. 5 |
| Origins and Nature | p. 19 |
| Pictures and Things | p. 56 |
| Writing and Power | p. 87 |
| Holy Writ | p. 120 |
| Logos Ex Machina | p. 155 |
| Afterword: Page as Mind | p. 217 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 223 |
| Notes on Sources | p. 227 |
| Illustration Credits | p. 239 |
| Index | p. 241 |