Lev Grossman discusses inheritable libraries, the similarities between print books and wifi, and the pleasures of the codex in this video.
All the things that are in me are in you
On the Master of Social Suicide
It’s fitting in a weird sort of way that this article, which illustrates the unravelling of Truman Capote’s career, has quotes from two characters named Slim Keith and Babe Paley. Back in 1988, Gerald Clarke covered the story from a slightly different angle.
“Years passed.”
Recommended Reading: “So I Went Away” by Crapalachia author Scott McClanahan.
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Lambda Literary Award Finalists
Congratulations to the Lambda Literary Award Finalists, who were announced this week. Finalists include Carrie Brownstein, Matthew Spender (our review of his memoir), and Truman Capote.
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The Confessions of Bill Styron
Now that you can purchase the letters of William Styron, you can note how especially funny (and sad) it is that Darkness Visible, the author’s book-of-self-help-slash-memoir-slash-confession, sold well enough to overshadow the novels that made his name.
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2015 VIDA Count
The 2015 VIDA count was published on Wednesday, tracking the representation of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, and ability in liberal arts. It’s a good time to revisit our piece on last year’s numbers to see what progress has been made.
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The thing is, I have a large physical library, as well as an ereader, but I still get the majority of my books from the library, which I “lose” once I return them. It is no longer part of my codex, except as part of my Goodreads list. But libraries, which have been around for ages, have not encountered this kind of backlash, even though they present the PRECISE same problem as Lev Grossman would see it.
First off: I am very sympathetic to Grossman’s larger point: the phenomenological and epistemological significance of the shift from scroll to codex. Essentially, Grossman give a lazy gloss of Roger Chartier’s history of the book. For those who are interested, pick up one of Chartier’s shorter volumes translated into English. “The Order of Books” and “Forms and Meanings” are good places to start.
THAT SAID: when it comes to reading the novel, Grossman gets his history laughably wrong.
What was the first novel? That question is vigorously debated by literary historians, but there are two general camps. The first camps say that the vulgar (i.e. Romance language, not Latin) chivalrous romances are the first novels (Amadis de Gaula, for example). Other say the first modern novel is Cervantes’ Don Quijote. Either way, we are talking about post-print, post-Gutenberg narratives.
The novel required two things in order to come into being: 1) mass distribution of texts; 2) mass literacy. In order to have novels, people needed to be able to get their hands on the books and be able to read them. Both mass literacy and mass distribution of texts are post-Gutenberg phenomena in Europe. Before the widespread availability of printed material, there was no need for literacy beyond the Church and the Court. After all, what is the point of learning to read if the only reading material is kept hidden away in the local monastery under lock and key? It is only AFTER Gutenberg’s technological innovation that something like a “reading public” even come into existence.
Furthermore, the novel form as we know it was not perfected in the codex medium. The great European novels of the nineteenth century were in fact serialized, i.e. published in installments–like comic books today–in newspapers. I repeat: newspapers, not codex. Charles Dickens is only the most popular and well-known example.
All this to say: the shift from codex to e-reader is indeed significant, but any attempt to connect the codex to the novel is historically misinformed. Grossman needs to get his history straight.