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How important is materiality, really?
Submitted by silversprung on 10 October 2006 - 6:11pm.
I've been mulling over this question for about a week now: How important is Hayles' discussion of textual materiality in the grand scope of all literature? I mean, it's clearly pretty important for new kinds of media like hypertexts, and it's also important for avant-garde novels like House of Leaves that choose to be aware of (and play with) it. It can even be significant for a traditional novel like A Human Document that is 'treated' by another artist into something new and materially interesting.
But what about the vast array of books whose authors either weren't aware of or didn't care about the materiality of their books? Is there really something unique about the materiality of these texts? Hayles seems to imply that there is. But it seems to me that the characteristics of most books' materiality are nearly identical: you can read the pages in any order you want, but because they are bound to a spine, there is a clear sequence that the author prefers. You can access any part of the book at any time. You can add your own words and markings to the text, permanently. The list goes on... But is there an actual difference between the materiality of most, say, novels? Or works of nonfiction? I suppose if their content is about materiality in some way, or if they change the traditional format of the book to fit their particular subject, then they will have a unique, perhaps interesting, textual materiality. But it seems that most books won't fall into this category. Maybe electronic writing and avant-garde literature is as exclusive and narrow a field as Lulu was suggesting?
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Hayles, hypertext, Materiality
Why would materiality be less important when it's causing sameness than when it's causing difference?
Of course there's not much difference between the materiality of two novels--so we call both novels. Despite recent experiments, most novels share a certain character because their materiality is similar.
But the materiality and the social context of novels was and is quite different than the handlettered and handbound texts that preceeded them. Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann, as well as Ong and McCluhan, have written extensively about these distinctions.
To round things off greatly, earlier texts were episodic and poetic, not extensively plotted. They were valued as visual works of art, and were not interchangable. The sense of their truth was interpreted primarily by expert readers -- by clergy, mostly -- and was not seen in the same kind of analytical terms. They remained essentially adjuncts to a fundamentally nonliterate culture -- at least not literate in the sense that Ong discusses.
Imagine what the creation and use of biblical-era scrolls must have been like. And what about Gilgamesh, pressed into clay tablets with a stylus? If we count Gilgamesh and The Iliad, then we're going to see material differences. Of course, no one calls Homer a novelist. But The Iliad did represent the contemporary form of long narrative in its day.
I'm just suggesting that
I'm just suggesting that textual materiality doesn't have as many interesting things to say about most of the literature that we read in college (and I think that a lot of the stuff in the canon, although certainly not all of it, is worth reading) as it does about the literature we're reading in this class. I'm suggesting that we not get quite as carried away as Hayles does and declare that every text's materiality is indispensable to an understanding of that text. I mean, in a way, this is true-- I gave several examples in my original post about how the materiality of modern books is significant to the meaning of the text that is contained in them. But I don't think it would be very fruitful in every literature class that read, for example, novels, to examine and re-examine essentially the same textual materiality.
Now, your examples of scrolls, clay tablets, and pre-printing press books all of course have very different materiality. But I was thinking specifically of novels as they are bound and read today.
yabbut
I'm suggesting that we not get quite as carried away as Hayles does and declare that every text's materiality is indispensable to an understanding of that text.
I take your point here. There are many books that don't do anything with their format, and thus the format seems to become utterly transparent.
On the other hand -- part of Hayles's deeper point, I think (and the thing that McGann and Drucker's work also points toward), is that the materiality of the book has become utterly naturalized for us, but it's not natural. Early print books (what are called the incunabula) had none of the conventions that we've come to expect in books -- not only no chapters, no running heads, no page numbers, but even more than that, no consistent divisions between words, no rules about where line breaks could fall, and so forth. It may not matter much to the analysis of any one particular book, as opposed to any other book, but our entire experience of reading has been constructed by a technology that took decades to evolve. For Hayles, I think, that materiality (or medium specificity) can be allowed to slip by unnoticed, but only because it's become so fundamental to our reading experience that we simply could not have books as we know them without it.
In a way, I think the mindset she's attempting to cultivate is like that of Walter Ong: While we cannot ever truly comprehend what a culture without literacy (or a text not structured by the book's materiality) would be, thinking about the shift from literacy to later media forms can help us appreciate the epistemological effects that literacy has had...
kiddie pop-up books
Hmm...I think it was Hayles who said we couldn't appreciate the specificity of books until we were introduced to different mediums. Even so, I think you're right in that most traditional books do seem to have the same materiality. Most. But what about pop-up books? There are definitely interesting questions about materiality in regards to those kiddie pop-up books. And what about those tactile kids books with, like, bits of fur and sandpaper for you to feel? I totally remember reading books with bunnies and actual, real cotton balls in the book, or other bumps for other strange animals. I even remember those Goosebumps books actually had bumps on the front cover. Those books are definitely considered "books" in every sense of the word, yet they also deal with materiality in a form very different from other traditional books.